Chronology

Pages

37

Spring 1965

Walter Gropius approaches Motherwell with a proposal to commission a large mural for the John F. Kennedy Federal Building he is designing in Boston. Motherwell buys one thousand sheets of a Japanese rice paper called ''Dragons and Clouds'' and over six weeks in April and May paints the Lyric Suite, a series of over six hundred ink on paper works that comprise his purest sustained experiment in automatism. Motherwell stops work on the Lyric Suite on receiving word of sculptor David Smith's fatal car accident on May 23 in upstate New York. Smith had been Motherwell's closest friend; Motherwell is named one of the executors of his estate.